The Snow Queen

By Michael Cunningham

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 258 pages; $26)

Few writers produce more beautiful sentences than Michael Cunningham. At his best, as in his 1998 novel "The Hours," the sentences add up to far more than disconnected flashes of brilliance, and his penetration into the human condition runs much deeper than the glossy sheen of his prose. Yet when "The Hours" won a Pulitzer Prize, champions of entertaining social novels complained that Cunningham's fiction was hyper-literary, precious navel-gazing.

"The Snow Queen," Cunningham's sixth novel, shares several elements with "The Hours," including a tightly focused interiority that shifts among four New Yorkers as it follows them closely on their quotidian rounds. As in his last book, "By Nightfall," two of the characters are brothers, one of whom experiences what he believes may be a vision of divine presence, while the other struggles with drug addiction.

At the heart of Cunningham's novels is a quest for not just meaning in life but transcendence, even in the face of middle-age ennui and coming to terms with unfulfilled expectations.

"The Hours" pulled this off beautifully, enhanced by its connection with Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." "By Nightfall," despite its lapidary prose, felt insubstantial. "The Snow Queen," which takes its title from Hans Christian Andersen but relies on a political backdrop to broaden its sights, falls between the two poles.

Cunningham is the king of the comma, with dazzling multi-claused sentences that run on and on, burrowing ever deeper into his characters' meandering minds. In sharp contrast with its complex, compound sentences, his new novel is tightly structured, beginning on a November night in 2004 just before the presidential election in which George W. Bush was elected to a second term, and ending on a November night four years later, a few days before Barack Obama's historic defeat of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Bracketed by those two autumn nights, Tyler and Barrett Meeks, brothers who live together in a seedy apartment in the "tawdry cityscape" of the Bushwick section of Brooklyn (where it seems that "even the criminals have lost their ambition"), undergo life changes that are as subtle and profound as the shifting political winds playing out on a national level.

We meet 38-year-old Barrett walking through Central Park, reeling from having been "mauled, once again, by love." Barrett's younger boyfriend has cut him off completely with a devastating five-line text. Hurt and dismayed by this "romantic dropkick," Barrett has become "another of New York's just-barelies." He's a Yale alumnus who has quit graduate school and failed at numerous ventures. After losing his apartment, he moved in with his older brother, Tyler, and his fiancee, Beth, who is dying of cancer.

Barrett works as a salesclerk at a trendy shop in Williamsburg that Beth started with the fourth member of their quartet, Liz, a 52-year-old who dates vapid twentysomethings and is still doing "that thrift-store cowgirl-hooker thing." Cunningham skewers the ridiculously overpriced faddish merchandise and hipster scene with penetrating delectation.

When down-and-out, "adamantly secular" Barrett, a lapsed Catholic, sees an apparition in the night sky above Central Park, a "pale aqua light, translucent, a swatch of veil," it makes him feel shades brighter than before. Is it any wonder that he can't let go of it? Unfortunately, like others' dreams, this celestial manifestation is far more compelling to Barrett, "the family's tortured Candide," than to us.

As for Tyler, "he didn't exactly plan on being an unknown musician at forty-three, living in eroticized chastity with his dying girlfriend and his younger brother." He's frustrated by his attempts to write a brilliant, soaring song as a wedding gift to his dying bride - but even furtive "quick sucks of harsh magic" from his hidden stash of cocaine don't help. He shares his torment with the reader in passages about composer's block and hitting a creative wall that are as excruciating as descriptions of dreams and visions.

It is easier to write compellingly about spectacular failures than about characters who just don't live up to their own expectations. Where "The Snow Queen" shimmers, it is not in parsing the difference between "not pursuing worldly ambitions and no longer feeling like a failure for not pursuing them," but in descriptions of the "distant oboe moans" of a freight train and a bedridden young woman "as frail and ivory-colored as a comatose princess."

The novel also shines in resonant observations like Barrett's, after he connects with a man at a deli following a short discussion of the relative merits of Coke versus Pepsi: "Love, it seems, arrives not only unannounced, but so accidently, so randomly, as to make you wonder why you, why anyone, believes even fleetingly in laws of cause and effect."

In this often doleful novel about remissions and relapses, hope and dejection, it is the hits of love, loyalty and exquisite language that provide the best highs.